Graphic artists and designers are an important part of documentation, but until lately I didn't look...

Recently I had to do my own art (at another company). Most of their existing Visio stuff was miserably overwhelmed by text. And the graphics were enormous, too, spanning pages! Art is best when it's painfully simple. People need imagery they can hold on to when reading explanatory text. Blurring the two into one complex an annotated graphic is Not the best plan. Yet that's exactly what happens when geeks use Visio.

In your discussion during this podcast, you seem to be restricting yourself to when to use visuals in software documentation.  However, illustrations are becoming increasingly important in many types of technical documentation.  Product documentation for technical products is a good example of this.  In many cases documentation must use CAD drawings as the basis for illustrations.  The process of gaining access to CAD drawings and then converting those into illustrations or graphics which will add value to technical documentation is often a very time-consuming task or series of tasks.  

Recently, I've been learning a bit about using a software product from Right Hemisphere which facilitates producing 3D illustrations and animations from CAD files.  I believe their product even allows XML tags to be associated with illustrations or parts of illustrations.  According to the Aberdeen Group, companies are implementing 3D publishing to "reduce time to market, lower product development costs, and create higher quality product documentation...Best in class companies are 50% more likely than other companies to be using 3D publishing to reduce time to market and communicate manufacturing instructions to the plant and to use graphics to overcome language barriers.  

Since translation costs are so high, using graphics or animation offers a "universal language" approach which lets technical documenters minimize words and simplify the documentation.    It seems to me that, as we look to the future, we will more and more be trying to provide virtually "wordless" documentation.

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